[Scummvm-devel] Streaming sounds in Scumm games

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Thu Aug 6 10:36:15 CEST 2009


Am 06.08.2009 um 08:51 schrieb Filippos Karapetis:

> Er, I've already put a #if defined(ENABLE_SAGA2) safeguard which  
> affects both shorten.h and .cpp. And the Shorten code is only used  
> in the WIP SAGA2 engine, not the whole SAGA engine.


Awesome! Sorry, I overlooked that.

> As for the sound code in SAGA: I've written it to load samples in  
> memory, as it simplified the overall code in that part, as the SAGA  
> engine has to deal with a variety of different encodings (PCM, VOC,  
> VOX, WAV, VOC, AIFF and Shorten). The whole sound effect/speech code  
> in SAGA should be changed to play samples from disk directly, rather  
> than loading them in memory, but I believe that this is not possible  
> for VOC, WAV and AIFF files with the current common code.

To be pedantic: no audio code can ever play directly from disk, it  
always has to load the data into RAM -- the main difference is whether  
it loads all, or only parts. The current VOC/WAV/AIFF code will always  
load all into memory; while the MP3/OGG/FLAC code is capable of  
"streaming", i.e. only loading parts from disk into memory, use them  
up, then load more.

Now, the SAGA engine already always loads the *whole* VOC/WAV/AIFF  
data into memory. Thus, changing it from using the load* functions to  
the makeStream* functions would not cause a major difference. *But*  
this change would make it automatically benefit from any improvements  
we may make to the makeStream* functions.

And I see no problem with changing SAGA to use makeStream for VOC/WAV/ 
AIFF. It can do it for MP3/OGG/FLAC; it should be a matter of  
replicating that code, more or less. In fact, with some care, the  
current code duplication in the MP3/OGG/FLAC handling code could be  
reduced, too.

The resulting code should be simpler than the current code, too.


Cheers,
Max




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